


Freedom of Choice (Even When There's No Choice At All)

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Empathy, Gen, Mind Control, Old Friends, Outer Space, Rebels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 10:52:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13588533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: A refugee from Alliance control, Sophie Devereaux is one of the most powerful empaths in the known universe.  Her ability to control the emotional responses of the people around her is unparalleled, and the military applications make her a person of extreme interest.Ordinarily running across an Alliance officer would be a matter she would leave to the crew that took her in and promised to keep her safe.Problem is, this officer is one of her oldest and dearest friends.





	Freedom of Choice (Even When There's No Choice At All)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Radiolaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/gifts).



> Space AU? Not once, but twice? Did you guys compare notes?
> 
> That you for playing with us again, Radiolaria, and for your patience while I work around school to get these last few gifts finished up. I hope you enjoy it!

_Angry voices…_

“Dammit, Sophie – you know what I went through convincing them you could be trusted! Moves like this don’t help!”

“I hope you don’t think I was going to stand by and watch while he skewered her with that museum antique he carries! You certainly weren’t going to step up and do anything.”

Resisting the urge to open her eyes, Tara instead concentrated on keeping her breathing smooth and regular. If things had turned the way it looked, she wouldn’t fool one of the people watching her for long, but every moment they believed she was still unconscious was a moment more intel she could seize for herself.

“You’re going to apologize. And don’t even think about turning those eyes on me – remember, you told me what to look for.” Silence, then the sound of booted feet crossing a metal ship’s deck, moving away from her.

Silence fell again – long enough and thick enough this time that Tara began to feel uncomfortable. Before she could give into the feeling and open her eyes though, she heard a familiar voice say, “Now you’re just being insulting.”

 _Fine._ “I thought there wasn’t any way to tell if you were using your abilities,” Tara said, opening her eyes at last and looking up at her childhood friend.

Sophie Devereaux waved a hand dismissively. “It makes things easier if people believe they have a means of controlling the monster. Did I hurt you?” Tara’s last conscious memory was of the world lighting up around her, and the noise of an old-fashioned stun gun filling her ears.

“Was that you?” Motioning Sophie back, Tara, pushed herself slowly into a sitting position – mentally cataloging every aching muscle and bruised area of skin. Collectively it was a lot. “All I saw was the six- foot bastard sword.”

Sophie made a soft huff of disapproval. “Eliot. He used to work for one of the runners on Whitethorn. Hardison says he has views on using guns now, thus the sword. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

“I’ll live,” Tara told her, offering up what she hoped was a reassuring smile. Despite their current situation, she held no hard feelings for Sophie. Twenty-five plus years of friendship wasn’t something you just threw away like a pair of shoes you’d outgrown. “So, what can you tell me? How much trouble am I in?”

 _And there goes the eyebrow._ “Alliance officer on a ship crewed by people with strong resistance leanings? I don’t know, Tara – how much trouble do you think you’re in?”

“Resistance? Don’t you mean Rebellion?” Tara would have given anything to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but she’d seen too much. Calling the loosely organized group of misfits that opposed Alliance policy a “resistance” was too clean, too highbrow. She couldn’t make it fit with the property damage she’d investigated, bodies blown to pieces by IEDs. _Children…_ “I know you don’t have any love for the Alliance Sophie, but throwing in with killers and anarchists?”

“Not killers!”

Startled half out of her wits, Tara looked up to see a preternaturally lithe young woman twined among the ship’s girders overhead. “The Alliance are the killers,” she announced, frank blue eyes meeting Tara’s gaze without the slightest hesitation. “They took my whole family away, just because my brother didn’t like what they were doing on Greenhaven.”

Completely confused now, Tara looked at Sophie. Her friend was looking up at the young woman too, but unlike Tara she clearly knew the interloper. “Is everything okay, Parker?”

 _A sylph,_ Tara realized, as the girl unwrapped herself from her perch and dropped gracefully to the deck. Sylphs were a race of tree dwelling humanoids from the planet Greenhaven. Most of the ones Tara had seen in her travels were acrobatic performers – traveling from space-port to space-port, earning what they could and trying as hard as they could to keep their families together.

This one – Parker – was certainly built for acrobatic skill, but Tara suspected that on a crew with “strong resistance leanings” she earned her keep in other ways. “Eliot’s fighting with the Captain,” Parker said, answering Sophie’s question while still keeping a wary eye on Tara. “Hurts.”

Sophie blew out a soft, quiet breath, nodding. “Eliot forgets about other people’s feelings sometimes. Are you okay with me helping you here? I was talking to my friend, Tara.” Her voice had changed slightly in pitch and cadence, but there was no discernible difference between a mother trying to soothe a frightened child and the times Tara had actually witnessed Sophie using her gifts on someone.

 _If she isn’t using her powers, she needs to start,_ Tara thought, shivering under Parker’s still very-angry gaze.

“She’s Alliance,” the sylph practically hissed. “Everybody says so.”

“She’s also my friend,” Sophie countered. “And she will promise not to move from that spot while I help you feel better.” Tara flinched as she realized Sophie was looking at her now.

“Not one inch,” Tara confirmed.

Even though she was completely sincere, it still took several agonizing minutes for Parker to agree to move in closer. She ended up sitting at Sophie’s feet, still looking up at Tara with obvious doubt in her eyes.

“Sylphs channel negative emotions differently than most humans,” Sophie explained as she began combing her fingers slowly and rhythmically through the tangle of blond hair. “When somebody like Eliot gets going, he causes Parker real, physical pain.”

Equal parts fascinated and confused, especially since Parker was obviously beginning to relax, Tara asked, “So how can you change somebody’s perceptions? If his anger causes her pain, how do you stop that by working on her?”

To her amazement, Parker was the one who answered. “Sophie re-tunes my nerves.”

Sophie smiled wistfully. “It’s a little more complicated than that,” she admitted, “but Parker is essentially correct. I have to adjust her endorphin levels and shift some other chemical responses, but it gets the job done.”  
***********************************************  
 _There we go,_ Sophie thought, reaching out with a tendril of the power she was using on Parker to soothe Tara. _Be calm. Be easy. Don’t think too much about what Parker just told you._

The ability to control things like fear and pain were incredibly rare, even among the gifted ones of Sophie and Tara’s home-world. It was why at twenty-three Sophie had known the moment she laid eyes on the Alliance recruiter that she would be leaving with him. “You can make a real contribution, Sophie,” her father had told her when she had admitted she didn’t want to leave. “No responsible citizen refuses a call to duty when it comes.”

The promise of seeing Tara again had softened some of the sting of leaving home. And the first year of her life in the capital hadn’t been difficult or stressful. In return for submitting to the Alliance doctors’ tests, all of her expenses were covered – giving her a far more interesting and comfortable life than she could have imagined for herself had she stayed with her family.

Even once the testing stopped, at first nothing had been asked of her that Sophie wasn’t willing to do. She gave the Alliance garrison a gentler way to interrogate their prisoners, using her powers to convince them that they _wanted_ to cooperate. She helped ease the suffering of patients in hospitals.

_No responsible citizen refuses a call to duty when it comes…_

It wasn’t until she was moved to helping treat soldiers, victims of PTSD, that Sophie began paying attention to the words being said over and behind her. There were military applications for her gifts that she’d never considered, and none of the conversations she listened to seemed to involve asking her permission to use them in furthering the Alliance cause.

The ship’s intercom crackled to life. _“Sophie – we need you on the bridge.”_ It was Nate, and she could taste the stress in his words, even over the communication system.

Rousing herself, she looked across at Tara. “I have to lock you in. It’s for your own safety – I’m sorry.”

Her friend nodded. “I get it. Do what you have to do.”

Reaching down, Sophie patted Parker on the shoulder. “Parker, sweetheart? Come on. Nate needs me on the bridge. You know you can’t stay here.” After a moment, the young sylph pushed to her feet without any assistance.

“Are you coming with me?” she asked Parker, once Tara was secured in her cell.

Before Parker could say anything, the shudder of cannon fire striking the ship’s defensive shields rocked the deck under their feet. Eyes wide, Parker nodded. “Bridge is probably safest.”

Without another word, the two women ran the length of the ship, and up the two levels to the bridge. The scene that met Sophie’s eyes reminded her of the news waves her father used to watch every night while the family ate dinner. Laser fire had joined the periodic cannon fire – bolts of light streaking past the windscreen into the endless void – and even through the ship’s stabilizers, they could feel the shifting and lurching of the ship as Hardison tried to keep them from getting blown out of the sky.

Sophie sensed immediately why she had been summoned. Alec Hardison was the kind of pilot the Alliance would have done anything to count among their troops. She still hadn’t heard the story of how he’d fallen in with Nate and the others, but his emotions had a frustrating habit of fraying at the edges when tensions escalated past a certain point.

Without waiting for Nate to give what he thought passed for an order, Sophie crossed the bridge and took her place behind the pilot’s chair. Hardison was already muttering under his breath – a nonsensical litany occasionally punctuated by a whimper of fear. Drawing in a quick, centering breath, Sophie set her hands on his shoulders, and brought her powers to bear.

The irony wasn’t lost on her that the work Hardison needed – and was always profusely grateful for – was the very work she had refused to do for the Alliance. The difference, of course, was that the soldiers she would have been working on wouldn’t have had any say in what she did to them.

“Who is it this time?” she heard Parker ask.

Eliot snorted. “You think we can take an Alliance officer on board and not attract attention?”

Sophie’s heart sank, but she couldn’t afford to divert her attention from Hardison. His nervous babbling had begun to taper off, but there was no telling what might happen if she released her control now.

“Hardison will get us clear,” Nate said. “And then we’ll figure out what to do with our passenger.”

The discussion of whether or not to weaponize the ship had come up at least half a dozen times since Sophie had joined Nate’s crew – she had no idea how many more times they’d hashed over the idea outside of her hearing. Nate’s stance, which she thoroughly agreed with, was that they weren’t soldiers. They weren’t fighters. Guns on their ship, even if only intended for defense, drew attention they didn’t want.

‘She’s Sophie’s friend,” Parker said. “She doesn’t act like other Alliance soldiers. I like her.”

“Yeah?” Sophie closed her eyes and sank deeper into her powers, not wanting to risk being distracted by Eliot’s blunt assessment of her friendship with Tara. “How long did she work on you before you _decided_ you liked an Alliance officer?”

“Eliot,” Nate said – his voice low and pitched in the tone he typically used to control his enforcer. It was one of his most intriguing qualities, as far as Sophie was concerned. She knew that he called a different world home than the one Tara and Sophie claimed, and if his gift extended to anything close to what Sophie could do, he had been very careful not to let her see it.

But his control over Eliot tasted enough like her own powers that she was left to wonder.

“Boss?”

Startled by the sound of Hardison’s normal, non-panicked voice, Sophie eased back on her controls. The pilot reached up and patted her hand. Turning it, she gripped his hand briefly, then let him go and stepped back.

Nate had already stepped in close to see what had caught Hardison’s attention. The pilot waved at the console. “We lost them. Or they lost us. Not sure which.”

“Did you sense anything?” Nate asked, his attention ticking briefly to Sophie.

She shook her head. “This kind of work is delicate. I have to stay focused, or there’s no telling what could happen.”

“And we appreciate her staying focused,” Hardison insisted, his eyes wide.

Nate clapped him on the shoulder. “Find us a nice, deep hole we can hide in for a bit.” He motioned for Sophie to follow him; the two of them retreated to the rear of the cockpit, where Parker and Eliot waited.

“Tara won’t betray us,” Sophie declared, before any of them could say anything.

Parker nodded almost immediately, but the sylph’s support wasn’t going to do her any good, if Eliot’s expression was any indication. “She’s Alliance. Her first loyalty is to the cause.”  
“Just because she’s Alliance doesn’t mean we have to kill her,” Sophie protested. “We can just find a planet where she can hook up with a transport, make her way back to the Alliance controlled planets. We…”

Her heart sank as she caught sight of Nate’s expression. _No,_ she thought defiantly. _You’re not going to make me just stand by and…_

But it seemed as though Nate had a different idea. “We’re not killers. Eliot. Not like this. A fair fight is one thing, but I’m not going to stand by and let you execute a prisoner. That makes us no better than them.”

Before Sophie could breathe a proper sigh of relief though, he’d turned on her. “We can’t just let her go, either. If even one Alliance soldier knows you’re with us, they’re never going to stop coming for you.”

She wanted to argue with him, wanted to tell him he was wrong, but words failed her. As much as they loved each other, Tara was still a believer. She wouldn’t do it to hurt Sophie – she would believe she was helping her friend – but either way Sophie would end up back in Alliance hands and Nate and his crew would be dead…or worse. “So what then?”

“She stays with us for now. Under your absolute control – I don’t want her to feel anything but absolute love and loyalty for this crew.” His expression was as serious as Sophie had ever seen it. “Based on what you’ve told me, that’s within your power, yes?”

It was, but from Sophie’s point of view it represented the exact kind of violation she had refused to perform for the Alliance. “Let me talk to her,” she said. “Lay out her options. If she agrees to my control, so be it.”

“And if she doesn’t?” Eliot asked pointedly.

Sophie met his gaze without flinching. “If she doesn’t, it will still be her choice, and I will respect that.”


End file.
